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How do I safely and responsibly dispose of an old PC? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 months ago by CleverOleg@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

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My buddy built a PC for me in 2014. I've gotten a lot of use out of it, but for the last few years I've just been using it solely as a media server. Which it works fine for. But we are running out of space in our house and that thing is huge and loud, so I want to replace it with a Lenovo mini PC to work as my media server and use my external 5 TB hard drive for storage (I have a couple TBs just in pictures and stuff).

However, I realized I don't really know how to dispose of this old PC. I really don't want to generate a bunch of e-waste. I'd be happy to give it away but I can't imagine there's a way to get rid of an 11 year old homebuilt PC (good specs at the time, but still). I would be willing to pay a service to dispose of it in environmentally-responsible way, but I also feel like that you really need to know who you're giving it to since whenever I see e-waste sites pop up around town it always seems shady.

Suggestions?

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[–] drhead@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago

Can't say much about where to dispose of things, but if drives are part of what you are disposing, look up how to use the ATA Secure Erase command to erase them. It'll be much faster than any other method of erasing a drive (essentially instant, basically drives that support this encrypt everything by default and using ATA Secure Erase just deletes the key) and will make old data inaccessible on it but will leave the drive reusable.